Posts Tagged «encryption»

In further security news this week, the NSA and GCHQ collaborated to steal millions of SIM card encryption keys from one of the world’s largest suppliers. This ensured they’d be able to monitor mobile communications worldwide no matter what — and they did it by targeting individuals accused of no crimes and not otherwise under investigation.

British Prime Minister David Cameron is using the recent attacks in Paris to call for increased signals intelligence and more comprehensive monitoring of UK communications. If he succeeds, it could set a significant precedent for other western governments.

Starting in 2015, everyone will be able to get their hands on a free, officially sanctioned SSL/TLS certificate so that HTTPS can finally be enabled everywhere. The new service — a certificate authority (CA) called Let’s Encrypt — is led by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Mozilla, and the University of Michigan, with Cisco and Akamai joining as major launch partners. If you don’t know much about SSL, TLS, and HTTPS, trust me when I say that this is a very big deal.

Just about everybody wants encryption to move forward to one extent or another, but as one former Google researcher points out, truly large scale encryption would be the end of the internet as we know it.

Air Force One — the US President’s flying fortress — which has been using the same clunky handsets since the Reagan administration in the ’80s, has finally received some slick new phones that are much more in keeping with Obama’s 21st century aesthetic. These new phones — customized versions of the the Airborne Executive Phone (AEP) — are provided by military contractor L-3 Communications, and they probably cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars each. In what must surely be some of the best news the President has received in the last couple of years, while the old system consisted of two different phones — one for secure communications, the other for non-secure — each AEP is capable of making calls in either mode from a single handset.

Use of this site is governed by our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Copyright 1996-2015 Ziff Davis, LLC.PCMag Digital Group All Rights Reserved. ExtremeTech is a registered trademark of Ziff Davis, LLC. Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written permission of Ziff Davis, LLC. is prohibited.